Chinese traditional furniture has a long history of thousands of years. It has experienced the germination of primitive society, the development of low furniture in Xia, Shang, spring and autumn, Qin and Han Dynasties, the transition to high furniture in Jin, Sui and Tang Dynasties, and the basic shaping of furniture sitting on one's feet in Song Dynasty. Finally, it reached the peak of history in Ming Dynasty, creating superb furniture making technology and exquisite artistic modeling.

The influence of cultural tradition on Ming Dynasty furniture

Throughout the social development of Ming Dynasty, there are two attitudes towards art. In the early Ming Dynasty, in the field of ideology and culture, the division between the Han Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty was fully revealed, in order to show the isolation from "Hu Yuan's old" and flaunt the cultural orthodoxy. In this case, the Neo Confucianism of Cheng and Zhu in Song Dynasty was used to maintain the orthodox position of Confucianism in Chinese thought. After the middle of Ming Dynasty, Wang Yangming's theory of the mind sought the nature of the mind with "conscience" instead of the way of treating people with negative cultivation of the mind advocated by the Neo Confucianism of Song Dynasty. At that time, it formed a trend of thought of personality liberation, attaching importance to the expression of emotion and aesthetic taste, and attaching importance to nature and self in art, which became the aesthetic thought after the middle of Ming Dynasty.

These two different aesthetic emotions and ideological connotations are reflected in the furniture design of Ming Dynasty. Ming style furniture is steady and generous, with moderate proportion, smooth and square, which reflects the "golden mean" under the rule of Confucianism. On the other hand, the simplicity, emptiness, softness and brilliance of Ming Dynasty furniture, as well as the natural fluency and harmony of furniture lines, are the embodiment of Taoism.